Word: gwen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Want to Flourish." Outwardly, Gwen John was as reticent as her painting. Inwardly, her life was one of intense feeling, rebellion and search. She was a spinster who became the mistress of Sculptor Auguste Rodin, an agnostic who turned to the Roman Catholic Church. In his new book, Modern English Painters, published last week, Sir John Rothenstein devotes a chapter to Gwen John, tells much of her story for the first time...
...Pembrokeshire, Wales, a quiet girl who sometimes broke out in bitter clashes with her lawyer father. In 1895, at 19, she left home to study art with her brother Augustus in London. "We shared a room together," remembers Augustus, "subsisting like monkeys on a diet of fruit and nuts." Gwen soon crossed to Paris. She wrote her brother: "There are people like plants who cannot flourish in the cold, and I want to flourish...
...tiny allowance from her father, but that ended with his first visit, when he saw her wearing a dress she had painstakingly copied from a Manet picture. "You look like a prostitute in that dress," he told her. "I could never accept anything from someone capable of thinking so," Gwen blazed back...
...Patient." Gwen John was in her 30s when she met Rodin. But Rodin was in his 60s, and busy with a complex public life. "Be patient and less violent," he admonished her. Yet the illustrious sculptor was fond of Gwen, and wrote frequent letters scolding about her health. And even after she entered the Roman Catholic Church she clung to Rodin for love and comfort. "My heart is like a sea which has little sad waves," she wrote. "But every ninth wave is big and happy...
...Gwen John spent the last 25 years of her life living and working in poverty at Meudon, near Paris. After Rodin's death, she turned her devotion to a collection of cats; almost the only humans she suffered were the nuns of Meudon and the orphans they cared for. She took Holy Communion each day, but when she was absorbed in painting she would forgo Mass for a month at a time. Her style changed drastically: while her early canvases were built up from thin, fluid paint, she now changed to thick paint, made her colors lighter and lighter...